How to build a pre-opening mailing list – DSP 99

It’s difficult to overstate the usefulness of building a big mailing list when starting up your business. This isn’t unique to float centers, but we do have specific instances that make our cases unique in comparison to other industries. How soon is too soon to start collecting email addresses? Who should you be asking? Graham and Ashkahn drop some knowledge on the subject and doll out some useful tips and tricks as well.

FTS Blog – Know Your Market – A Guide to Gathering Data

FTS Blog – Fancy Acronyms for your Business Plan: TAM, SAM, and SOM

Launchrock.com

Mailchimp.com

Listen to Just the Audio

Transcription of this episode… (in case you prefer reading)

Graham: Today’s question is, “I’ve heard you say getting emails is really important. What’s the best way to get a big mailing list before you open?”

Ashkahn: Big mailing list before you open, that’s a good question.

Graham: Actually, you know from a lot of Russian sites, you can just buy tens of thousands of emails.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: If you don’t really care about them being geographically close to you or imploding, or anything like that then, probably just buying a Russian list might be the quickest and easiest way to get a giant mailing list.

Ashkahn: That’s one approach. I mean the other approach is like you really just want to ask for it all over the place.

Graham: Yeah.

Ashkahn: That’s a lot of it, right? If you have some sort of presale, or something like that going, that should be probably the biggest call to action on your website, and the second biggest should be signing up for your mailing list. That’s usually the order, even past the point that you’re open, you still want to think about that.

Graham: I was going to say, it’s not even a pre-opening guideline.

Ashkahn: Yeah. It’s like step one, give me money, and step two …

Graham: If you’re not going to give me money, give me your email address.

Ashkahn: Yeah, so maybe I can talk you into giving me money later.

Graham: That’s actually just the rationalization here. Right, and it might be that it’s the same if people come in to float, right, if they’ve actually scheduled to float and come in, but haven’t given you their email address, you still want to get it so you can remind them how much they enjoyed spending money with you, and that they want to do it again in the future.

Ashkahn: Yeah, so that, having it prominent like that, we even, on our door during construction, before we were opening, have like a little pieces of paper and pen saying to write your email down.

Graham: Slip it through our mail slot.

Ashkahn: Yeah, we’d put you on our mailing list.

Graham: People did, we got a few a day.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: Which is excellent! So yeah, I mean everything down to having those physical pieces of paper up there can be really useful. At parties, we would, I mean if I was just talking to someone about floating, before we opened, I’d still try to grab their email address, and put it down on our mailing list. If you’re using The Helm, then we have this nice Helmbot feature, where you can send people gift cards just by entering in their email address, and sending a text to your Helmbot number, which also grabs their email address, which can be nice, so if you ask and you’re like, “Hey, can I send you a free float? Do you want to be on our mailing list,” and they say, “Yes,” you can then just add that in and that’s kind of a nice way to do a double whammy, you know, get them into float and add the little bit of padding to your mailing list.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: First thing, pre-opening, let’s talk about how soon can you start gathering emails? Which is probably way sooner than you think that you actually can.

Ashkahn: As soon as you can do it, like as soon as you can get something up, and make a mailing list.

Graham: Right after you finish listening to this, like next time you’re in front of your computer for half an hour, is the point. Even if you’re not sure that you’re going to open, that you might want to consider grabbing email addresses.

Ashkahn: Yeah, just the cost of starting a mailing list is basically nothing, you know? You don’t have to have a center name, you don’t even have to have your real website yet, as long as there is some interest and you have some place to direct people to.

Graham: As long as you know roughly, which county or state you’re thinking about opening up in.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: That’s pretty much as far along as you need to be, and what you do then is you pretty much just launch a single page website, with the goal of grabbing people’s email addresses, and that’s just called an email capture landing page, basically is what you’re doing. There’s a nice site too, that I recommend to people sometimes called, Launchrock, like a rocket launch and a rock concert, rock launch. That’s what they do, the entire company just designs single page email capture webpages for you, so again, in half an hour you can go to launchrock.com, and have something set up, tied into a free mail chimp list, and start grabbing email addresses, as long as you have a domain name, and again, if you don’t have a name of your center, you can just put “float tank center coming soon to so and so county enter in your email address for more information as we get closer to opening.”

Ashkahn: Right. What’s the worse case scenario? You never send an email out.

Graham: Yeah, and eventually you take down the website and …

Ashkahn: That’s it. There’s no downside.

Graham: Yeah, you maybe generated a little more interest in floating for your area. That’s the worst that happens, you know? I will say don’t, my advice for that is don’t put an opening timeline on that landing page, even an opening year, if you’re like, “I really want to open in 2019.” Don’t do it because it’s going to pass that, and it’s going to get slightly embarrassing when you have to change.

Ashkahn: Yeah, just say, “coming at some point in the future.”

Graham: “…Maybe.”

No, you don’t need to put the maybe in there, but that’s how vague you should be. Again, as soon as possible do that, and if all you get in the next week is one email address, that’s one more email address that you have on your list that you didn’t have before, which is really valuable. By the way, the reason that we harp on this, which it seems like the question asker already has kind of heard some of our philosophy on this, but in our mind a giant mailing list is one of the single most valuable pieces of marketing weaponry at your disposal, and it’s because things like Facebook and Twitter, they get a lot more attention these days. Social media is this big, kind of sexy marketing thing that’s out there, but all of your followers and all of your customers on there are on someone else’s platform. They really are the ones who own the lists that are on those platforms, not you. You have access to them, as long as they deem to give it to you without paying for it.

Ashkahn: Yeah, through them. Facebook is a perfect example. You used to be able to put out a post and they would go to everybody who was following you, and then they decided, “Let’s just limit that to a percentage.”

Graham: Yeah, maybe like 10% is more fair, you know?

Ashkahn: If you want to pay us money, you can go to a larger percentage of the audience, that’s your audience, that you built. You’re just susceptible to stuff like that when you’re on a platform, but mailing lists aren’t like that. The emails that you’re collecting are a mailing list that you have control over, and no one can start to put limitations on that.

Graham: Although there’s spam filters and promotions tabs, and different ways that people kind of filter out emails, they don’t want to get as much, there’s still a way bigger chance that you’re at least going to be seen, or your subject line is going to be seen as a result of sending out a big email blast to people than doing a Facebook post or something like that. You really do have just so much more control over your list, and what they actually get access to, so that’s why we harp on it.

In our experience, so we send out pretty much, you know we’ll send out ongoing information to our mailing list subscribers, and then once a year we’ll do a giant deal in June, and for that we found that on average, for every person on our mailing list, we collect about $2.65, and that’s just in a single year, right, so over the course of four years now, that single email address that you got before you opened has been worth over $10.00, is the actual value of that, and over the course of eight years, all of a sudden that email is worth $20.00 on average, scattered across the list, so you know, even though it’s simple, again, just those drip by drip, getting as many, many little emails that you can, onto that list really adds up in terms of actual monetary value that you see year after year for having it.

Ashkahn: Yeah, especially when you sell it to the Russians too, to put into their other lists. Before we finish here, let’s talk specifics real fast, especially website specifics, I think, because that’s, as the ball gets rolling that’s mostly where you’re directing people to sign up for this thing, more where people are kind of hitting it at as they approach your website. In terms of actually collecting emails on your website, there’s a few things that you’re all probably familiar with from being on the Internet. You can, I definitely recommend having something on your homepage, above the fold, which is like the line that they call, just like the bottom of most people’s screens, by default when they first hit your website. That is a box where people can put in their email for your mailing list, but the steps beyond that are things like popups and welcome gates are the other things.

If you go to a website, the first thing you see is just a big, giant thing on your screen that says nothing but asking you to join the mailing list, and you hit yes or no, or whatever, and that gets you to the actual website. And those are interesting. We’ve had a lot of debates ourselves, internally, about the merits of having or not having those. The statistics show that they’re effective, so if that question seems pretty concrete to me, like they are, you will get more people signing up for your email list if you have something like that or not.

The downsides are that those are just kind of, you know, popups are not like a friendly term on the internet, so it’s like something that generally people describe as an unpleasant internet thing.

Graham: I will say, for those of you out there, who aren’t that deep in the internet marketing world or anything like that, I think that from the outside there’s a lot more hesitance to utilize things like that. If you start looking into the actual effectiveness versus complaint rates, versus unsubscribes, and different things like that, for implementing welcome mats, or even just lack of actions like scheduling floats or doing the main action you want on a website, although it seems you might turn away customers from having those, the data really doesn’t seem to show that. I can see how people might be annoyed for half a second when they click something, but just like you guys use the internet, so does everyone else, and they’re used to it.

If you’re thinking about it, you might be a little more hesitant to use them, or think that they’re going to detract from your business more than they actually will. Just something to keep in mind.

Ashkahn: There are lots of, there’s a lot more sophistication too, to those sorts of tools now. A lot of times now, if you’re setting something like this up, you have rules that you set up with it that says, “only show this once to somebody”, like the first time they come to your website, and then it puts a cookie on there, on their account, that makes it so that if they come back to your site the next day, they’re not going to once again be prompted with a popup.

Graham: Yep, you can do it so it doesn’t show on the first page that they visit, but if they click through to another page.

Ashkahn: Or if they scroll down a certain length, or after a certain amount of time…

Graham: Yeah, all kinds of things where you don’t just have to annoy every single person when they first arrive.

Ashkahn: Right.

Graham: You kind of vet people out a little bit.

Ashkahn: The newest stuff they do now is, they’re trying to detect when they think someone’s kind of like finished reading something, and about to leave your website, and that’s when they bring the popup up, which is pretty crazy, and it feels decently accurate to me too. I’m like, “Yeah, I was just about to leave this website.”

Graham: Yeah, I think there’s one like when the mouse cursor leaves the actual focus area, so it’s like when you’re actually going up to the address bar, up to another tab or something, that’s when it will launch it.

Ashkahn: It’s interesting because there’s definitely a lot of nuance to these things nowadays.

Graham: Again, we even argue still. We really try to give the best customer experience, so again, even internally there’s been debate about whether or not we want these kind of popups and welcome mats, and right now we have them active on our float center website, so at least for now, that’s where the ball has settled. Do it, build a giant mailing list. Put up your website now. Put mailing list sign ups on your door. If you go to trade shows, grab emails there. Grab them from parties. Grab emails from strangers on the street.

Ashkahn: Yeah, and don’t just include all of your customers who float with you on your mailing list. I would say is the other caveat. Your goal is not to grow your mailing list by whatever means possible, hence like the Russian email list sort of thing. If you’re just inflating it artificially then, first of all you’re spending more money to send the big emails blasts out to people, and you’re getting a lower return on it, and you’re annoying a bunch of people who trusted you with their email because they came into float, and they wanted it for a reservation reminder, but not for you to start sending them every two weeks, whatever updates about your business, so that’s generally our stance on it is, don’t just kind of abuse the fact that all of your customers are giving you their email by default.

Graham: Yeah, and they tend to respect that too. I think that you gain a lot of clout for not abusing that inherent trust when someone’s giving you sensitive or personal information.

Ashkahn: Yeah.

Graham: You know, and if you wait a few years until you sell it out to Russia, they’ll have no idea who was actually responsible for that.

Ashkahn: Okay, great. Well, if you guys have other questions, you can always send them along to floattanksolutions.com/podcast.

Latest Blog Posts